I was in London today giving back my Gizmondo (looked great on paper, not so great in plastic) and dropped into the Apple store on Regent street to play with Tiger. The refund from the Gizmondo fresh on my card, I actually had half a mind to grab a 12" Powerbook as a backup notebook for email, etc.

Having seen the Tiger demos, I was really impressed by Spotlight and Automator. On my PC, I shelled out 70 bucks for X1 search and all it does is make my system hang (actually just removed the damn thing) so the promise of built-in real-time indexed search combined with the Photoshop Actions-type Automator feature was enough to make me give the Mac another shot. Yet another disappointment!

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Emilie's put photos from last night's MMUG online. Includes never-before-seen nightshot images from the pub afterwards... Oooh, aaah... umm, yes.

Darn thing looks so good on paper... GPS, GPRS, SD card for content, etc. Why does it feel so unexciting? Perhaps it's the lack of location-based applications or my unsuccessful attempts so far to hack into it. Or maybe it's because the darn thing shuts off whenever it feels like it and/or doesn't appear to be able to keep a charge!

It uses Windows CE 5.0 and you get full access to the filesystem through the supplied ActiveSync. The SD-cards look simple too: There's an autorun.exe which must be the standard Windows CE autorun file. When I look at the SD Card for the Trailblazer game (which actually is really neat) on my desktop, I see a .hog file (a renamed CAB file?) Ok, I suck at this stuff -- I haven't been able to get regular Windows CE .Net apps to run on this thing -- tried a generic autorun.exe for example and it wouldn't have any of it...) Oh well... Plus there's a lit pixel that annoyingly blinks on/off at times.

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The Gizmondo accessories. Note the SD card and the Vodafone sim it comes with. Not shown: Built in GPS and camera!

Just came down to Regent st. before tonigh's MMUG to check out the new Gizmondo and ended up getting one. This thing is the future. 'll blog more when 'm back.